[lit-ideas] Feeling Cloudy?
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Anthro-L <ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:07:55 +0900
Clarity, focus, rationality, occasional bouts of neurosis or
hysteria—that's what the modern self is all about. But what about the
postmodern self? Anthropologist/marketing guru Grant McCracken offers
the following provocation.
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Feeling a little cloudy? Of course you are.
Because, I mean, to be fair, and let's be honest, you are a cloud.
You are an aggregation of interests, connections, and contacts, tagged
in several ways, linked in all directions, changing in real time. I
mean your mental world. It's all hints and hunches, guesses and
glimpses, shifting perspectives, tumbling assumptions. You take on
clarity for clients. Then you're all "let's get on with it"
pragmatism. But normally, and for most purposes, you're as cloudy as
can be.
How do I know this? Call me your consulting anthropologist. (No,
don't call me. Try a blog aggregator and call me in the morning.)
Anthropologists have an old question: how does a culture define the
self and the group. And now they have a new question: what
difference does it make to the self and the group that they are now
mediated by electronic connections (email, internet, SMS, IM, MMS,
blogs, aggregators, shared search engines, social networks, p2p file
sharing, online game play, etc.)
I think cloudiness might be an answer to the first question and
especially to the second. My guess is that new selves and groups are
richly heterogeneous, loosely and variously boundaried, capable of
expansion, contraction and sudden reorganization, not very well
governed, but still quite navigable and quite mobile, and, in still
other respects, dynamic in content, form and operation.
I think cloudiness was an emerging property of selves and groups in
the late 20th century, but that cloudiness has been intensified by the
new electronic technologies of the last 10 years. So the third
anthropological question is now, "Where does cloudiness come from and
how does it intensify?" Or to put this in a more pressing form: how'd
ja get so cloudy?
For sake of argument, we need a working model of the self. Let's
posit the one proposed by Clifford Geertz who described the Western
concept of a person as a
"bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive
universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action
organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against
other such wholes and against its social and natural background."
Wave goodbye. That was you before you bought a computer and signed up
for an email account. Those were the good old days, when people could
still complain about anomie and being locked in the lonely confines of
their selfhood...because they still had a selfhood, something
impermeable that kept the world out and the precious self in.
That was then. This is now. We are no longer "bounded,"
"integrated," "centered," "organized" or "contrasted." We are now
blurred, decentered, disorganized, and, well, a little vague. We are,
I prefer to say, cloud-like. (It's just so much more flattering. I
mean otherwise we are the proverbial dog's breakfast.)
--------------------------
Sounds like me. How about you?
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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